The Party of Crazy

This is why the Obama Administration criticizes FoxNews, because the right-wing is full of folks that beat this idiotic and destructive drum:

More than half of Republicans either say President Obama doesn't love America or say they aren't sure of his feelings toward the country he leads.

That's according to a new national poll due out tomorrow from Public Policy Polling. The firm gave TPMDC an early look this afternoon.

PPP polled 766 registered voters nationwide. Of the GOP respondents, 27% agreed that Obama "loves America," 48% disagreed and 25% said they weren't sure.

I spent the last five plus years bashing George Bush. I've accused him of a lot of things -- from violating civil liberties to war mongering to a daily narrative of his rank stupidities and lack of common sense.

So while I accused them of being rather "un-American" in some sense I never accused him of hating the country (whether he gave a shit about a large group of "Americans" is another matter). I certainly accused them of fucking the country, but never not loving it.

It's a line that's kind of hard to cross -- but FoxNews, Limbaugh and Beck cross it every damn day. And they rarely get called out for it by the spineless legitimate press.

Pelosi ready to fight

Amazing how all the budget hawk blue-dog BS falls away when it meets reality, except of course, with self-proclaimed blue dogs. While Harry Reid dithers and Obama, at least publicly, chooses to impersonate Grover Cleveland instead of FDR, at least Nancy Pelosi is taking a stand on better health care policy:

House Democrats are aiming to scale back the cost of their health care bill to well below President Barack Obama's preferred price tag by giving the government a strong hand in selling insurance in competition with the private market.

Obama has sought to spend no more than $900 billion over a 10-year period. The initial cost of the House bill was more than $1 trillion. On Tuesday, House Democratic leaders received a new cost estimate of $871 billion from congressional budget umpires who measured a robust version of a so-called public option for health insurance

Golly, it's good policy, it covers far more people, it's popular with the public, it saves money in the budget.

Surely, this is the policy choice of tyrants and slave holders! We must choose the more expensive, less efficient, crappier policy that saves the real harbingers of freedom and liberty, the health insurance company executive.

(pic from here)

[Cross-Posted at Firedoglake]

For you Movie Buffs -- The Primordial Glenn Beck Story is on today

A Face in the Crowd at 3:45 p.m. eastern, Turner Classic Movies.

Awesome performance by Andy Griffith.

Tales from Iowa

Par for the course...

Nothing, not even a train, could stop Kenyan Simon Sawe from winning the Des Moines Marathon for the second time.

Sawe was leading countryman David Tuwei by 10 seconds when, after a left turn onto the final stretch on Southwest Fourth, he stared right at a train passing on the road.

"Nobody is prepared for that scenario," said Sawe, the inaugural champion in 2002. "I couldn't believe it. It was a long train."

Tuwei caught the 40-year-old Sawe and the two waited ... and waited ... and waited for the train to pass. Third-place Geoffrey Birgen had nearly caught the two leaders when the train finally crossed the street about 40 to 50 seconds later.

PAT SAJAK DOES NOT APPROVE!!!

Probably not Kate Hudson either:





Insert easy joke about "Buying a Bowel" here:

Shedding light on Netanyahu's forthcoming Palestinian Homeland Policy

Makes you wonder if BiBi and Bolton's stache have gotten together for a cunning plan...

Stewart Nozette, 52, was arrested this afternoon at the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington by counterespionage agents from the FBI's on suspicion that he was meeting with agents from the Israeli intel group known as the Mossad...

...An 18-page FBI affidavit, signed by Special Agent Leslie G. Martell, says Nozette in January 2009 told a colleague "that if the United States government tried to put him in jail" on an unrelated matter, Nozette would move to Israel or another unidentified foreign country and "tell them everything" he knows.

And what does Nozette know?*

Nozette helped develop the lunar Mini-RF probe which recently helped confirm the presence of water on the moon. He's responsible for bombing the moon, folks!

*in all seriousness he worked on stuff like SDI and missile defense also, which I guess was more the reason for any sellable info.

"And especially me, Howard Kurtz"

"There was so much about Letterman's sex life to discuss and that's what is far more important than some boring Senator, especially a Republican Family-Values one. It's not like the latter was a a hypocrite or anything, take it from me, Howie Kurtz."

But the Village doesn't like it...

And the Blue Dogs sing la la la:

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that support for a government-run health-care plan to compete with private insurers has rebounded from its summertime lows and wins clear majority support from the public...

But in a sign of the fragile coalition politics that influence the negotiations in Congress, Obama's approval ratings on health-care reform are slipping among his fellow Democrats even as they are solidifying among independents and seniors. Among Democrats, strong approval of his handling of the issue has dropped 15 percentage points since mid-September.

Might that be because Obama is spending too much fucking time listening and worrying about the Villagers? Yeah, that would be correct.

OMG!

A shadowy "Chris Wallace" is telling "heroically unshadowed" Glenn Beck that he was present when Obama staffer Anita Dunn made a public speech about shadowy secret business out in the open and everything that was all Marxist and shit if you deleted some parts of it and created new parts in your own fevered imagination.

Alert Howie Kurtz, this needs to be thoroughly propogated in his media column to avoid writing about those WaPo Salons and fill out the other third of his column after Balloon Boy and David Letterman.

America's Concern Troll

Haven't we seen this column from Cohen the last three weeks? He's not only their shittiest writer, Cohen is now the creative equivalent of Krauthammer -- churning out the same goddamn column every fucking week.

"Who is Barack Obama, I dunno, I can barely type out a cogent paragraph, but if I keep on publishing the same thing it might start to make sense, sensible 'Village House-Liberal' that I am."

The power of the Porn-Stache

You cannot hope to stop cartoon figures that have served ABC News, from Brit Hume to Geraldo to the latest jewel in the plastic-Burger King-crown, you can only hope to contain them at an appropriate location.

John Stossel made his first appearance as a FOX News employee today on The Live Desk with Martha MacCallum and Trace Gallagher.

Gallagher asked Stossel why he joined the FOX family: "The health care story is one of the reasons," Stossel said. While still with ABC News Stossel said he'd produced an hour-long healthcare special, but, "I could not get it on the air at ABC. They were doing Michael Jackson stories. Fox covers the news, so finally, the freedom to talk about a few things I know about."

And, as is par for the course for John Stossel, he missed the truth…by….that….much:

Update from an ABC News insider: "John knows full well that he did not produce an hour on healthcare. It was a five minute retread of a piece that had been done a year earlier.

He's such a perfect fit for Rupert's empire.

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]

Media Criticism is NOT the job of the WaPo Media Critic

From the Howie the Putz's "Putz Chat" going on now:

Washington, D.C.: I think that one of the best points made in the last few weeks in this White House/FOX kerfuffle was made by the Daily Show. There was a big gay rights march in D.C. last weekend and FOX spent about 4 minutes on it, compared with literally weeks and weeks of coverage of a similarly-sized march by the Tea Partiers, complete with live on-the scene coverage. I was surprised you didn't touch on this at all. It's a perfect example of even though FOX does "news" during the day, that "news" is driven by conservative talking points.

Howard Kurtz: You mean that Fox News devoted more attention to the tea-party protests (cheered on by some of its hosts) than to the gay rights demonstration? That is truly shocking.

Yes, your sarcasm over news bias is totally not appropriate for someone as well-healed as you Howard.

Now back to whether Balloon Boy has any thoughts on David Letterman's sex life?...

Well, at least Philly has the Phillies

Because the Eagles lost to the Raiders (Jamarcus Russell plays competently, wtf?). But not only did they lose to the Raiders, the EAGLES fell to the PIGEONS.

Dear Readers...

I love you too much to post a conservative guy trying to rap about Obama winning a Nobel Peace Prize directly.

But not so much that I won't link to someone who has posted said monstrosity directly.

Jon Stewart's statement was about right

Last Thursday (was it Thursday?) on the Daily Show Jon Stewart made a quick aside to the "Balloon Boy" story.

"Oh thank goodness balloon boy was safe...LET'S GET HIM!"

The whole story is the epitome of how awful cable news is and how easy they are to exploit. If the father perpetrated this hoax then prosecute him, but metaphorically take your torches to the cable media as well, they're acting all indignant now, but if they weren't such whores to begin with this would never have become what it did.

"Oh thank goodness Balloon Boy is safe, let's get Wolf Blitzer! (metaphorically)"

Because there isn't a bigger moron (not on FoxNews) on television.

Take Down

Lord knows it's not the first bit of criticism of the WaPo editorial page, but Alex Pereene's take down is one of the best, read the whole thing:

And on October 10, the Post published an insane editorial on how the Nobel Prize should've been awarded to a murdered Iranian protester. This suggests that either the entire editorial board doesn't know that Nobel Peace Prizes are never awarded posthumously or they simply don't give a shit. The piece is still not corrected, because presumably any "correction" would have to read "the entire premise of this editorial is bullshit, sorry."

So how do you follow that up? How about by running an op-ed by a law professor and a right-wing think tank goon about how Obama's Nobel Peace Prize was... unconstitutional, maybe? Who knows! Who cares! They acknowledge that two other sitting presidents have received the award, but they do not even do the meaningless-but-intellectually defensible thing of arguing that those awards were also unconstitutional, they just say this time it's different because Obama got it so therefore Congress should forbid him from accepting it, because of the House of Saud.

In conclusion, blogs are killing newspapers by being irresponsible and not caring about "the truth."

Just wondering

Between Balloon Boy and the English Premier League has there been a bigger week for inflatable objects since the Hindenburg disaster?

[Is there some inflatable doll story I've missed in the last 70 years?]

Project Much?

Ever have one of those moments when somebody says something you do a double-take and think they would not dare say something so laughable?

If you are like me, you've had that since January 20, 2001.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the world's greatest projectionist Karl Rove:

...the [Obama] White House is "getting very arrogant and slippery in its dealings with people, and if you dare to oppose them, they're going to come hard at you and they're going to cut your legs off."

Only in Karl Rove World (a twisted world primarily composed of cocktail franks, headcheese, and ocular schtupping) is this a credible statement. Yeah, Valerie Plame, David Iglesias must think it's just awesome to hear.

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake]

Well, that's certainly different...

The design of the 2010 Olympic medals. Well, they're unique:



They look like something out of a Dali painting.

Not to be noticed by Howard Kurtz

Those paid salons the Washington Post was caught trying to throw -- that they expressed they were shocked, SHOCKED about. Well, turns out they kind of lied:

Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli says he knew more about the controversial “salons” the paper had planned than previously has been reported, including the fact that they were being billed as “off-the-record” to potential sponsors.

As usual, this will not be noted by Howard Kurtz -- there's discussion of Letterman's sex life to be had.